


one more story

by psikeval



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Synthesis Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 04:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10677885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: When Shepard wakes up, she knows that she is different.





	one more story

**Author's Note:**

> for context: spacer / sole survivor / vanguard f!shep ([here](http://psikeval.tumblr.com/private/159774190470/tumblr_oooquheACd1qm376w))

It takes a while.

Of course it does—it took Cerberus months, and that was to replicate Shepard completely, down to the last pigment and quirk and muscle memory. Upgrades minimal, kept to the essentials. Resurrection, restoration, but never _this_.

This process is something altogether new.

Most creatures, having undergone synthesis, showed it first around the eyes: a certain clarity and sharpness, at once disingenuous and calculating, disconcerting to those who had not yet changed. Any organic vision was by necessity flawed, incomplete, even misleading—the product of simple evolution, natural selection, ripe for mechanical upgrades.

They, all of them, see clearly now. No perception altered by preexisting prejudice, no detail overlooked, but observed and cataloged easily by a swift, smooth mental processing system that, in a single moment, leapt forward by countless millenia.

_Was blind,_ sings Mordin Solus, forever captured in a tinny, forgotten recording, _but now I see._

 

\--

 

When Shepard wakes up, she knows that she is different. 

A body sees its wear and tear, and Shepard’s more than most. Being conscious is, for her, a methodically unfolded catalog of accumulated pains. Tightness of the neck winding up towards tension in her jaw – the ache of bending fingers and that special, stabbing pain down the palm to her right wrist, too many times pulling a trigger – whatever’s been jarred to bruising by fights where she’ll charge, and charge, and charge. Routine, sporadic physical therapy can only do so much. Even Cerberus enhancements have their limits.

The reminders of her mortality most often arrive in sleep, in any number of too-familiar forms. An icy, airless void, creeping slowly down her lungs. Husks made of people she’s lost, tearing off plates of her armor and snarling, mindlessly ripping the flesh from her bones. A tank full of fluid that fills her lungs as the Illusive Man watches and smiles. A thresher maw, lurching up to swallow her whole. By now she’s woken from enough nightmares to have established a routine.

Panic, first and foremost. Head thrown back with a strangled scream, muscles strained tight, fingers clenched white-knuckled in the sheets. Breathing in as much oxygen as she can when her throat feels like a vise. Her chest—her whole body—is frozen at first, paralyzed, but when awareness seeps through Shepard’s limbs, no pain comes with it. No throbbing from her implant; not a single twinge of old wounds or more recent injuries. 

No sign that she dove straight down to her death.

The catalyst. The child. Shepard looks around and sees a comfortable, well-appointed, utterly unfamiliar room almost resembling a dormitory. The crucible, lit up so bright her eyes burned. It is softer here, warm colors, furnished out of wood or something like it. Explosions and shrapnel and blood seeping down through the cracks in her armor.

Shepard presses a hand down viciously on her ribcage, through the soft and formless clothing draped loose around her body. Right where metal tore through the flesh and guts of her, before she staggered and screamed and sent Garrus away, to spare herself bleeding out where he could see. But now it doesn’t hurt. _How the hell can it not?_

It feels too much like waking up to Cerberus, before. She jerks up the hem of what she’s wearing and stares at her torso. No scars. No pain from her neck, from so quickly craning her head. Her thumbs don’t crack, when she flexes them just so – not even a twinge from her joints.

As if they aren’t quite hers anymore. 

Shepard drops her head further and breathes in, slow, as deep as her lungs can stand. It’s _not_ like before; it can’t be. There will be an explanation, this is not the time to panic. She stands, leaves the soft beige garment on the bed, and approaches the mirror.

The face is right. The height, the build. The posture, even. And yet.

She presses with her fingertips, slowly, on smooth dark skin that is hers and is not, deprived yet again of all its callouses and scars. But it remembers so much, this thrice-reconstituted flesh in the shape that is Shepard. It knows the weight of her Claymore, the gloss of the Normandy’s rails, the delicate scrape of Garrus’ mandibles across her inner thighs. The precise location of the violent red crack across her face that never healed. They linger, sure as ghosts.

That slice of missing skin on Shepard’s skin, the only wound that yet remains – now, underneath, glows brighter, and glows green.

One test remains, and truth be told, she dreads what it might show. She lowers her head, feet braced, shoulders back, and _calls_ – she has no other word to describe it – she calls to the implant, feels the buzz of biotics rushing down to envelop her, ready to charge. And then Shepard soaks it back in, shuddering at the rush of all that power gone straight to her bones.

Which means it hasn’t gone. Whatever’s happened, she still can fight.

She looks in the mirror and catches a brief green glint far back behind her pupils, matching the color of the spiderweb crack on her cheek. There is, of course, the matter of eyesight itself; before the war began, she had been due a corrective treatment. Slightly myopic. No cause for alarm. Her field of vision now shows her the time of day and ambient temperature.

It’s a small display, unobtrusive and easy to dismiss from sight. Intuitive. Shepard blinks away the computerized notations with hardly a thought, frowns for a moment, then summons her resolve and looks through the window at the brightest sun in the sky. Her sight alters and dims within seconds – ultraviolet filter, automatic. No doubt night vision would be the same.

The whole thing, even knowing the cause, feels so goddamn surreal. When deciding the fate of billions, it hadn’t occurred to Shepard to wonder how those changes might change _her_.

She sits back on the bed, in the stance she learned from Samara, and considers what she knows while twisting her neck from side to side, soundless, painless.

Organic. Synthetic. Biotic.

It will take some getting used to.

 

\--

 

“Shepard,” says Liara, when she steps out onto the deck.

It’s a hell of decorative time to arrive on Aor’eth, the small salarian colony where, it turns out, Shepard’s spent the past few weeks recuperating. The planet’s rings are most striking at sunset. Despite extensive terraforming on habitable areas, the gases higher in the atmosphere are as turbulent and volatile as ever, and the fading sunlight refracts through them and lights up the rings as if they’re made of violently glittering gemstones. The end result is beautiful, but not remotely soothing. Shepard appreciates that about it. 

She turns her head slightly to the side, letting deep red-orange sunlight warm her cheek, but does not look behind. There’s an odd trepidation, a tightness low in her throat, at having been found.

“Figured you’d be the first.”

“I do have one or two channels.” Liara moves closer as she speaks, her footsteps soft but steady till she sinks neatly down on the reclining chair next to Shepard’s.

Her eyes are the same shade of blue they always were. Not green, not metal, not a friend now turned half-reaper. Just Liara, watching, gentle and perceptive, not a freckle out of place. Shepard clears her throat. “So I’ve heard. Any big news lately?”

A smile tugs at Liara’s lips, as relieved as Shepard feels.

“Oh, you know. Just recently, the fate of the galaxy decided, billions of extinctions averted, life as we know it altered irrevocably, whole fields of study reshaping themselves to fit a new reality.” Liara ticks these off on her fingers while watching Shepard with a soft, rueful, vulnerable smile that’s so much more rare than it used to be. They’ve known each other for such a long time; have faced so much. “And the great Commander Shepard cheats death yet again. Aside from that? not really.” 

“Hm.” Shepard slits her eyes against the burning golden center of the sunset, more out of habit than need. It doesn’t hurt like it would have, once. The world has become easier to bear.

There will be people who hate her for the change she’s brought to the galaxy. Perhaps millions, or even billions of them. She’d thought, when she stood in front of the catalyst and chose, that it meant accepting death. That finally, after years of struggling to do the right thing, or the best thing, or just _not get any more people killed_ , her story had come to an end.

It would have been in many ways a mercy. 

Shepard lets her head fall back, and shuts her eyes. “I’m tired, Liara.”

“Of course. If you’d rather no one knows you’re alive, they won’t.”

“They don’t need me,” she says, and isn’t sure if it’s true or she just so desperately wants it to be.

“Shepard,” says Liara. It’s exasperated, fond, too full of some emotion between tears and laughter to parse. “Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to put the weight of the universe back on your shoulders. Think about what _you_ need.”

As if it’s easy. As if Commander Shepard would know how. What she needs has turned into minimization, damage control, to not get any more people killed than she has to. The smallest losses, the fewest nightmares, was all she could think to hope for. And now,

 

_now?_

 

Shepard sighs and bids goodbye to a perfect sunset. “I should go.”

“Yes.” Liara meets her eyes, still smiling, unsurprised, unflinching. “I thought you might say that.”

And it’s a silly, sentimental thing — but the truth is, it’s not until the next morning, when the shuttle pulls out of atmo, that Shepard really feels alive again.

 

\--

 

Anderson’s apartment on the Citadel still accepts her ID scans without complaint, for whatever it’s worth — but on that front, Shepard can’t bring herself to hope for much. It’s unlikely a new owner, no matter how security-conscious, would prioritize deleting the clearance of someone so infamously dead.

Unlit, the place still looks about the same. Tidy and a little old-fashioned, fake fires burning low and bright in digital hearths. No lights but the bare minimum, till Shepard keys in a command to raise them.

Couches, living room, bars unchanged. Paneling the same shade she remembers, only one chair set back from the table. Empty glass there, a heavy tumbler from behind the bar. Dextro-compatible food in the kitchen. Not proof, but enough to make her heart go lurching forward in her chest. Her hands shake a little, closing up the cabinets. It could be. It could.

Perhaps she’s only trespassing in someone else’s home, running fingertips through dust for proof that its ghosts are hers. And maybe the pounding of her heart is only the fear she’ll fail. 

But when you’ve already been dead twice, most things seem worth the risk.

The corners of the place are just as disconcertingly blocky as she remembers, like a cramped shuttlecraft writ large instead of the sleek, curved lines of home. There are no engines, no power cores, no beating heart. Just a jumble of squared-off, lifeless limbs.

It was probably wrong to come here, but it can’t hurt, now, to look at the rest.

Before she can reach the stairs, the door slides open, and Garrus is _there_ , tired and grim and every bit as scarred as she remembers, eyes glowing a faintly mechanical green. To Shepard, he looks like he always has — which is to say, the most welcome, breathtaking sight in the galaxy.

She stands very still for him. She lets him see.

“All right,” he says, when a minute has passed, his voice a harsh, tremoring chord of tones that breaks Shepard’s heart all over again. “Let’s get this over with. Are you a clone? construct? imposter? illusion? green-gen VI? figment of a lonely turian’s imagination?”

“None of the above.”

Garrus’ eyes never stop moving, almost frantically quick, darting between Shepard’s face and her side, where a deadly wound should be, her outstretched hands, her legs, the nondescript civilian clothes she wore for the journey here.

“Holy shit,” he mutters, already stepping forward.

He collides with Shepard hard and fast and buries his face in her neck, opens his jaw to bite gently into the skin there, holding fast. Anchored. Kissing, a custom suited to species with soft, sensitive skin, is typically something they’ve done for her benefit; this, on the other hand, is for Garrus. His breathing is shaky and he stands there, biting up and down her neck while they hold each other almost painfully close. Shepard’s body knows the feel of his sharpest tooth digging in, like a thorn catching flesh, and the shiver it always sends down her legs.

“Shepard.”

“Vakarian,” she replies, steadier than she feels and possessive, rewarded by the tremor that racks through his bones.

“You’ll need to explain, at some point.”

Shepard wraps her arms around Garrus’ waist, spreads one hand over the armored curve of his carapace and sighs softly, blissfully, content. “But?”

It’s almost a purr, the low subvocal thrum of his voice as he mouths his way slowly up towards her ear. “I think we’ve wasted enough time, don’t you?”

And she does. She really, really does. 

“Just to be clear,” Garrus tells her later, like an absolute _bastard,_ when she’s almost ready to come and he _knows it_ , “I wasn’t planning on us setting foot outside for at least a week.”

“Seriously? Is that—” Shepard arches her back and rolls her hips down toward his fingers, but Garrus evades the movement, barely teasing between her legs with one blocky fingertip. “Are you really—” she grabs at his arm and misses entirely, “—could you _please_ ,” she grits out when Garrus intercepts her hands and presses them neatly back down onto the bed. 

“So polite,” he murmurs, then ruins the effect by laughing. It’s ragged and terribly fond and it would be enough to steal her heart, if Shepard hadn’t already handed it over. She hauls his face close enough to kiss and lets him nuzzle rough along her cheek, humming a resonant chord in his throat, content. Garrus sighs, or pretends to, against her skin. “All right. If you insist.”

Much later, considerably more tired, Shepard slides half-boneless from on top of Garrus to the mess of soft, ruined sheets, and chuckles sleepily into a pillow. “A week, huh?”

“Well.” He’s having trouble catching his breath; that last round really took it out of him. Of them both, if she’s being honest. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Make it two. I’ve got some time.”

 

\--

 

Commander Shepard’s memorial is in London, where the crucible once stood, on a street still rebuilding from that final, bloody battle. Garrus showed her some files, when the subject came up, and the structure is tasteful enough, considering. Crammed full of too many painful mementos and elegiac bio-vids to be a place she wants to visit.

Her grave is in Vancouver, not far from where she saw the Reapers descend, in a cemetery built to bury Alliance personnel lost in the war. In absence of a body, it’s as good a place as anywhere. Shepard died on Earth, but she never lived here. Not even for a month’s stretch, until her commission was suspended, and the memories of her time spent in Vancouver then are…uncharitable. For her it was only a prison, one far more alien than the Citadel.

It was Garrus, too, who told her who would visit today, on the battle’s anniversary.

From a distance — from the very end of a row of plain white headstones — Kaidan looks the same. It’s only up close that Shepard starts to find fault in the façade, spiderweb cracks in the foundation. Premature lines around his eyes and mouth, silver-white hair at his temples. The unnatural stillness of his hands.

“Kaidan,” she says, too bluntly, and he turns.

There’s a silence between them that’s hard to stand, without the hum of engines, the crack of gunfire, without armor and rank and protocol, just the two of them. Just history. Too much of it for anyone to reach across that distance.

“Of course you did,” Kaidan finally says, and it is vicious, disbelieving, defeated, relieved, cracked open and half choked with laughter or tears – a decade’s worth of feeling in a single phrase. Shepard thinks that he is resigned, by now, to the truth of her.

On Horizon, he looked as though he’d truly seen a ghost, but that shock and wonder, the fragile, raging hope behind it, has faded far away. She’s not a Spectre or a Cerberus operative, neither hero nor the vacuum left behind. She is one of Kaidan Alenko’s more familiar nightmares.

“Shepard,” he rasps. The word sticks in his teeth, mouth twisting in half a grimace to dislodge it, but he looks her right in the eye, like he always has. “You’re kind of a jackass.”

“Always have been.” 

He laughs, quietly, more exhaustion than any kind of humor, and doesn’t contradict her.

She looks at Kaidan Alenko, the sincere, messed-up kid with biotics, the soldier whose loyalty ran deep enough to ache, the guy on your team who’d give you his all through the worst of his pain, the second human Spectre – this weary-eyed, contemplative, dry-humored bastard who for some reason thought she was worth following to hell – and thinks that if the galaxy had asked a little less of her, she might have managed to be his friend.

“Hey, Kaidan,” she says, even though he’s been looking straight at her this whole time. He never stopped. “I’m sorry.”

The poorly-hidden grief behind his eyes only darkens and deepens, twisting without ever hiding from sight. It’s a relief when Kaidan looks away, but it only lasts for a moment – he’ll let Shepard do a lot of things, when all is said and done, but he’s never let her off easy for them. His mouth stretches thinly into something like a smile. “Yeah. Let’s not do this again, all right?”

Shepard smiles back, and it hurts a little, but maybe, after everything, it should. “You got it, LT.”

 

\--

 

“Still real,” says Garrus quietly, eyes sparkling with genuine wonder.

There’s room here for a joke, she knows, and it might not be funny but it could take the edge off the crater of loss in her chest, the space carved by what she nearly left behind. Shepard closes her eyes for a moment, savoring the feeling of Garrus’ fingers framing the shape of her face, then opens them again, already grinning. “Yeah. Still real.”

“All right. I can work with that.”

 

 

 


End file.
